Coyote's Mate by Lora Leigh

Anya Kobrin is a human who worked in Russia for the people creating the breeds. The Coyote breeds that she and the scientists who worked there helped create were supposed to be soulless killing machines. But there was a group of five female Coyotes that Anya wanted to save. And to do so, she contscted the Coytoe Breed named Del-Ray Delgado when she was only 16.

At first sight, he wanted her. But he put off rescuing her and the female Coyotes until she was 22, and afterwards, he made love to her like an animal. But unbeknownst to the two of them, that sex triggered a mating heat that was excruciatingly painful for her, and because he wasn't there, she had to suffer alone.

When they were finally reunited, she asked for a year away from his attentions, and the mating council granted it to her. Del-Rey threw himself into missions for eight months before returning to Anya, to the woman he thought of as his. But the time apart has changed her. She is no longer the eager child he once knew, but a woman who has been put in charge of the Coyote part of the base.

The Coyotes accept her as their Coya, and she's been successful at running the base and keeping the coyotes in line. But when Del-Rey returns, the other coyotes view it as a license to goof off on keeping things clean, which incites Anya's ire. But when Del-Rey decides to protect her from both her own enemies and those of the Coyote breeds by calling off the ceremony of their marriage, he sets off an escalating spiral that might end with the last thing he wants- the death of Anya.

Worse, by this point, she's expecting his child, and though Del-Rey doesn't want anything to do with the scientists who created the Coyote Breeds, indeed, he's done his best to hunt them down and kill them. But the only medical professional working with the breeds is Armani, and she's really only an expert on the Wolf Breeds, and Coyotes and Wolves are *not* the same.

With a traitor on the base, and Anya injured by a Coyote Breed who is convinced that Del-Rey stepped down from naming her his Coya because of her infidelity, can Anya manage to meet with the two Coyote Breed scientists she's convinced to come in from the cold and advise her about her child? Del-Rey is on her trail, but so is the spy, and he wants to make sure she doesn't survive the meeting!

I've read all of Lora Leigh's Breed books since they first came out, but this was the first one about Coyotes, and about Del-Rey Delgado, who also appeared in Tanner's Scheme. But here we see him with the woman who will become his mate, and needless to say, he screws it all up with her from the first.

He lies to her, shoots her father and brothers when he promises that he wouldn't, and then he has animalistic sex with her when she's despising him, and inducts her into a mating heat and leaves her. He may have had reasons for the first two and been ignorant of the second, but the fact that he doesn't level with Anya at the outset made me find him not very sexy or a good match for Anya.

I've read better Breed books. Del-Rey comes across like an asshole Alpha Male, the kind I like the least. Half of the time, I wanted to smack him silly, while I was annoyed with Anya for putting up with his crap. This was my least favorite of the Breed books by far, and if all the men are going to be this controlling and stupid, I am going to have problems reading more of them.